People insulting each other or you like kids on the schoolyard bothers you? How is that, I am rather curious?

For one smack and trash talk belongs to a game, rivalries and hate are essential in competition, just as is respect and having fun together.

Games and Sports alike live on these social dynamics between them. I have said it before: BF1 already made it hard to make friends in-game with the reduced social features this should not be further reduced by increasing the anonymity of each actor.

Trash talk is much more meaningful on the actual playing fields of sport. :D

To combat this though, I would go the opposite direction, make the chat more prominent, more meaningful. Basically like a forum. If yot think about it, even symthic thrives on all that little drama and rivalries. So I am actuall glad that stuff like a filter or report option never made it into a BF game.

In what schoolyard is "FUCK YOU NIGGER" acceptable? Where did you go to school? so that I might avoid it, I don't really have any interest in being in that sort of place

Smack or trashtalk is one thing, Hate speech is another. Hate does not belong in any game or competition. I've NEVER been in a tournament, IRL or online that has ever accepted "FUCK YOU NIGGER" as trashtalk or acceptable. Where have you been that "FUCK YOU SHITTY NIGGERS REVIVE ME" didn't get blacklisted for violating basic sportsmanship rules?

Even if I am insulted, why would I report anyone in a game, a guy that is probably decent but I will never meet?

This is becoming a theme with you isn't it?

Hate is not acceptable. "Fuck you Nigger" is not acceptable in really any context.

No-ones talking about making people more anonymous, We're talking about the ability to mute and report Hate speech. IRL I can just walk away. In every other online environment I can mute/block or report these people so they're not longer in the "room" so to speak. Why in BF do the other 63 people have no option but to hide the chat so No-one can be heard? or just leave the server? Why do you find this acceptable in Battlefield? is this acceptable when you play Football? Golf? Overwatch? Chess?

I'm amazed you feel that people who spend half the game shouting "FUCK YOU NIGGERS" are

Quoted

Probably decent people

I'm tempted to ask if it's you that keeps popping up in my games, is this self defence?

Personally I just want what pretty much every respectable online environment has, the ability to keep the gamechat about the game and general chatter, and not racism.

The greater issue is that the chat really has very little utility in the game. It's too slow to make useful callouts 99% of the time, and so it generally devolves into whining, raging, racism, and other awful stuff. I just turn the chat off and don't lose anything in the process.

I don't even find supposedly "playful" trash-talk to contribute much to the gameplay experience unless I'm in a certain mood.

Back when BF had community managed servers with custom scripts and active moderation, the community by and large self-policed. Now that mechanism is gone.

Well you can turn the chat off, and you can walk away as well, by simply ignoring it and only reading the relevant stuff. It is not like the chat is a particularly good source of intel in any case. Yep some stuff is rather unacceptable, but 90% is just the usual clutter and chatter. And then, I am just not offended by anything thrown at me in a video game that basically makes a living from creating frustrating situations and provoking reactions. I see people venting, mostly, and even if they insult, who am I to judge, if that is more than just a stressful expression? Honestly I am rather interested in why he is so frustrated with the game.

As said, I rarely see racist stuff in the alpha, or stuff that gets me triggered. The alpha in particular is rather civil, that is why I asked what offends you in particular and why that is. The fact is, most people are just people with many flaws, if one thinks otherwise you would never stop the urge to punch people all the time. You must know that you are a polarizing character yourself, right?

My point is, that if you go the full Hearthstone way, you kill a game's inherent social aspects. In BF you are rather free in expressing your thoughts, that comes with quite a baggae, that is why I would like it enhanced rather than restricted. That is reasonable. Reporting people for something that they said in a frenzy is also not my cup of tea, but I am in no position to be offended by anything just from my background.

Personally stuff that annoys me the most in game chats, are bad spelling, 1337speak and arrogant "get rekt" remarks or the inability to see other people's POVs.

To answer your question, I am sure I never wrote anything that would qualify as report worthy in an in-game chat, I mean why would I? I did however receive an infraction in 2011, when the forums for Lord of the Rings Online switched from a UK to a US operator. I believe I called someone a self-centered and arrogant or something along these lines. When it was still the UK Codemasters forum I did call him an idiot though and he called me out on a typo in a very rude way and generally being a piece of shit. It might be cultural, but Germans tend to be rather direct and we do not use racial slurs, since there are more important issues at hand, like indecent behaviour in a Open-PvP environment of LOTRO.

Edit: oh yeah, good point, since we do not play any longer on moderated or admined servers, this surely increased. That is a DICE-inflicted sideissue though for the sake of creating a streamlined game experience. When I admined my favourite server in BF4 I rarely kicked anyone, but when others were around there was a rather harsh policy on some things. Reverting to actual community servers with rules and also rules of conduct would help, but I think the Devs do not find the issue relevant enough compared to the extra buck.

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "VincentNZ" (Jun 30th 2018, 12:11am)

The greater issue is that the chat really has very little utility in the game. It's too slow to make useful callouts 99% of the time, and so it generally devolves into whining, raging, racism, and other awful stuff. I just turn the chat off and don't lose anything in the process.

Back when BF had community managed servers with custom scripts and active moderation, the community by and large self-policed. Now that mechanism is gone.

True, I don't even know why we can cross-team chat given how small the chaxbox is, it really just gets filled up with useless cross-team Whining/racism commo-rose spam and comppletely drowns out anything useful you could do with it.

@VincentNZ

pls re-read.

I CAN turn the chat off, and prevent any value from it whatsoever and prevent myself from talking to friends who arent on mic OR we could be able to mute asholes. I could just leave the server, along with the other 62 decent people, because thats a realistic and practical thing, gotta give those racists a safe space to vent their hate on the rest of us, gotta accommodate for hate.

Quoted

Germans tend to be rather direct and we do not use racial slurs

Germans are people just like the rest of us. Some people are racists.

Quoted

You must know that you are a polarizing character yourself, right?

I don't always agree with everyone all the time, but anyone and everyone is welcome to come chat whenever, You can always find me on the Symthic Teamspeak and Discord servers during most evenings. Polarising is stretching it. Most people come swing by and say hello without shouting "FUCK YOU NIGGER". Those people just get banned.

Such speech should never be accepted and repeat offenders are to be punished accordingly. Including full bans, should less severe punishments, such as chat bans, not prove effective.
It is unnecessary. It doesn't add anything to the game, it merely takes away from other people's enjoyment. And for what? To give someone a platform that they can use to showcase their anger, terrible sportsmanship and lack of basic human decency to a wider audience.
Let me put it this way. I love trash talking and rivalries are fun. But this is not a rivalry and it goes far beyond trash talking. If anyone were to go into their hometown and yell racial slurs at the next person they meet, what do you think the result would be? I wouldn't be surprised if the police was called or if some people took matters into their own hands, depending on who exactly you go and insult. If using these slurs is not generally acceptable in public, why should there be an exception for chats?

You also seem to misrepresent Darktan's argument. There's a big difference between Hearthstone's pregenerated lines and a chat that should have at least the functions that were asked for. So primarily muting and reporting.
In any case, why are you so against it? None of those features would affect you in any way. Your chat is unaffected since you don't need to filter people if you don't want to, . It is only for other people, who may not want to deal with that kind of stuff.
There are games out there that don't go full Hearthstone but through well developed chat systems, they largely mitigate issues arising from hate speech and similar.

Oh yeah I am just not offended by mostly anything people write in chat. I can fully understand if someone is, though. But I am a bit at bay with filters and I am against the ability for reporting people on these things that could have an impact on someone's game, because it does take care of the symptom for you since you are offended by someone being a dick, which is good, but that does not undick that fellow, if he gets an infraction, ban or something. Instead it will make him mad.

I used to have the same opinion as you guys until I played Lord of the Rings Online, which had a rather civil community and I would say very liberal rules concerning the chat. They did enforce naming rules though. So you could not name yourself Xxnightelf1xX and expect to keep it long. The game was operated in Europe by Codemasters and had a pretty adamant PvP community and we had cultivated a very careful hate towards each other for disapproving with how people played the game and spoke out in the forum and in-game calling each other idiot and whatnot, without too much of a hassle. Mutual respect and hate sums it up.
Then the game switched back to the original developer in the US and that all changed. So one side would camp a certain respawn point and would be called names for it, as it has always been and suddenly people got infractions for it. People actively reported people they did not like because they were provoked to a chat reaction and calling someone a son of a whore or something and you could get banned, not because someone was offended, but because you could cause grief. And it got out of hand fast. It really turned sour, when the reports where suddenly starting to not be about chats anymore, but because your name was deemed inappropriate and one day you log into a game with a character you have played for four years that has another name, because you did something once that somebody else did not like. Personally if that had happened to me the game would have been over. So the community was from then on totally poisoned beyond any help. That is why I think a player operated or instigated report system for anything just increases toxicity. It tends to create an environment of vigilants and denunciations.

I am totally on board with moderated and admined servers or a DICE "police force" that acts professionally, which is way too much to ask for, I know. I am fine with filters, although I really do not care about any bad word in chat. I am against any actions taken against players though that were likely caused out of sheer frustration with the game or of other players unless it is some really heavy shit.

Speaking of this, naming rules I would not find bad since my first encounter in BF1 was with Gaskammergunther and any kind of way to get rid of these stupid emblems, which includes racial stuff or all that rather obscene stuff, we saw in BF1 and 4.

Really surprised to see the chat functionality can be spinned into such a big argument. It's just an in-game chat. That's it. Personally I am neutral to having it or not having it or having it policed or whatever.

In a more serious note, I am also surprised that not many people mention that Narvik has 6 flags. Why the even number of flags DICE? And it probably will not change over the course of the game, given that it hasn't happened at all with BF1.

the ability for reporting people on these things that could have an impact on someone's game, because it does take care of the symptom for you since you are offended by someone being a dick, which is good, but that does not undick that fellow, if he gets an infraction, ban or something. Instead it will make him mad.

I'm not seeing any problems anywhere here.

I don't mind even flags, the opportunity for a stalemate is interesting. As long as most maps are odd numbers then we'll be fine.

Really surprised to see the chat functionality can be spinned into such a big argument. It's just an in-game chat. That's it. Personally I am neutral to having it or not having it or having it policed or whatever.

In a more serious note, I am also surprised that not many people mention that Narvik has 6 flags. Why the even number of flags DICE? And it probably will not change over the course of the game, given that it hasn't happened at all with BF1.

Yeah, I just wanted to give my two cents and I thought the discussion that ensued went rather well and decent. Always good to hear arguments from the other side of the topic. And it just goes to show, there is not really much else to talk about. The game works surprisingly fine in all regards considering gameplay. It could release tomorrow and would make a decent shooter game. Gameplay, balance, optimisation is doing pretty well.

The UI/UX is horrible as expected from an Origin Game, but I do not know if complaining about it would make much sense, I mean they would not revert to battlelog at this stage or revamp their menus both in-game and in the main screen. The fact that playing with friends is not possible at all is definitely as infuriating, as I have little incentive to play a Battlefield game alone.

The game is also rather generic in presentation, similar to CoD WWII I would say, but it is an Alpha and many features are not implemented yet, although I am not really looking forward to most. Still bottom line is: The game is more fun than I expected and more fun than BF1 ever really was for me.

On the flag thing I would agree with BU, I see little problems especially since it seems to still be using the BF1 ticket system, just backwards, so uneven numbers of flags do not have the same tactial importance as in BF4.

I don't have access to the alpha but what I've seen and heard seems kinda good, with some caveats.

Fortifications might end up being a cheap and very low risk points-grind with possibly little positive or even a negative effect on your team. Not sure what could be done to fix that or if it is even worth looking into, really.

Gunplay is reportedly fun, but I must say the balancing so far looks sketchy in some places. Not sure what to think of the low ammo reserves so far.

Airplane repairs and refills by flying through a huge circle seem dumb. Battlenonsense mentioned this in a video and provided a neat looking alternative in a video of his.

Honestly I'm kinda sad that tank self-repair is back. I'd like them to be temporary powerups, not everlasting death machines. Tank machine guns also seem to be incredibly lethal.

On chat functionality: I think there is room for language filters, but they should be optional, as is the case in WoW. A report function and a mute that basically blacklists the player for you until you remove him from the list should be in as well. The goal should be to generally not restrict chat on a game-level but give players options to set their own preferences and rules. Kinda like how BF4 servers often have language filters set up by the server admins, members of the community.

Memorable quotes not taken yet:

Of course, this ignores the non-constant cross-sectional first moment of area across the chest as well as non-constant material properties of the boob; it would be difficult to perform a more detailed analysis (as in, I'd have to have a shape function AND I'd need to derive a function for elastic modulus as a function of lateral breast coordinate) but whatever. It's 2am and I'm lazy.

You should also answer this question I had posed in that thread: Would you be willing to pay your surgeon more if he was going to use a chainsaw for the opening incision of surgery? Clearly using a chainsaw isn't truly suited for surgery but that doesn't really matter. If he's "skilled" enough to be able to use the wrong tools of the trade, he should be rewarded for that skill right?